One Rand Man gets a documentary, will be used as educational aid

Anyone who was paying the vaguest bit of attention to the media in mid 2014, you would have noticed plenty of coverage around Sanlam’s ‘One Rand Man’ campaign.

For the duration of the campaign, a middle-class South African man, with a solid job and in an apparently stable financial situation, was asked to give up his credit and debit cards for one month. It’s caused waves and brought the agency behind it major industry Kudos. If things had stopped there, everyone would’ve probably walked away happy. But now the campaign has spawned a documentary aimed at growing the levels of financial education in South Africa.

According to Sanlam, this is in line with experiment’s aim of encouraging South Africans to reconsider the way they spend and save — down to the last R1 coin. “We do not have a savings culture in this country so just talking about the importance of saving was not going to have an impact. We needed to hold up a mirror if we really wanted to make South Africans stop and think about the way we spend. Furthermore, online banking, mobile apps and easy access to credit have completely disconnected us from our money,” said Yegs Ramiah, chief executive Sanlam Brand.

The documentary, which comprises footage from the campaign interspersed with insights and observations by Sanlam and other experts, as well as documentation on the lessons learned during the experiment, will now be made available to schools, as well as financial advisers who want to educate their clients.